Cracking Up, Breaking Down

“Oh, he’s getting deported,” said my mother with a big, bright smile, right as my father was leaving the house to meet with an immigration lawyer. For years I’ve ruminated about this joke, wondering how to begin to talk about it—about what I knew was at once very funny and very sad.

I found a way to approach this scene when I came across Sarah Gambito’s work, which I first encountered at a Kundiman Retreat in 2014, and which has, ever since, become increasingly important to me. Gambito’s collections, dear companions and, at the same time, key provocations, jolt me out of habitual thinking, linguistic complacency, unexamined or really unlived life, which is, ultimately, a kind of soul death. Maybe I’m being dramatic. But Gambito’s work reminds me: what am I doing in making poems if not radically (dramatically!) shaking things—at least myself—up? 

Her poems also remind me that often the best (soul-enlivening) drama is intertwined with comedy. And vice versa: the best comedy is dramatic, is even rooted in tragedy. One without the other lacks the messy textures of life as well as truth. Here’s some funny-sad, tender-alive truth from “Ancestor,” a poem in Gambito’s latest book, Loves You: 

Glassine and shaking yourself with canine aplomb. 
He had the immigrant captain kirk way of speaking. 

I want you to be deeply heard. 
[...] 
But, for you not to be naive or surprised
when people turn away. 

What rings true in many of Gambito’s poems is her portrayal of how immigrant families navigate and talk back to the US immigration system, its labyrinthine confusions and cruelties, with sharp and layered humor. Gambito’s humor never says just one thing one way. Her humor is punchy and incisive, silly and absurdist, tinged with sorrow and sometimes laced with rage. Such humor comforts, offering relief from the unpredictability and brutality of a system and culture that dehumanizes immigrants, especially immigrants of color. Her humor critiques the status quo, emboldening an immigrant or child of immigrants to speak up and speak out: I know what the dominant narrative thinks of me; don’t think I don’t know. As Gambito writes in “Immigration,” the opening poem of her second book, Delivered (Persea), and the first poem of hers that I read: 

So what if I don’t love you. 
My problems don’t even happen to me. 

But to three girls grandstanding by the Potomac. 
Respectively: your mother, her mother and her mother. 
Three bitches in front of a trashcan. 
Desirous of psychotherapy and a split lip courtesy of me. 
Because I didn’t ask to be born here. 
Didn’t ask to learn the language. 
And don’t know how to save you. 

Am I frightening you? 
I’m frightening you. 

Good and good and good and good. 

This is a speaker who refuses to be “saved” via coerced assimilation, who refuses to play savior, or subservient, “good immigrant.” Here, good, occurring four times in the final line, each time more deliciously menacing than the last, is how the speaker frightens a “you” who assumes she was going to be a docile and drama-free Asian woman immigrant. This “you” certainly wasn’t expecting the speaker to casually drop words like “bitches” and talk of giving someone a “split lip.” I doubt every reader experiences this poem as humorous, but I find it hilarious, wickedly so, while simultaneously full of strength. 

I can’t help but think of my mother, an immigrant who swears all the time (her favorite swear word is shit) and talks at length—around the people she trusts—about the bureaucratic nonsense and everyday racism she has to confront, about how it makes her boil with anger. Her oppressive circumstances mean that, when not talking to family, she is often soft-spoken and polite, a survival tactic she's had to adopt. She doesn’t want to offer gentleness to that which makes her feel small. 

What astounds me is how many people assume that all immigrants want to take up less space or that immigrants just are this way. As though all immigrants love the US—this big and important country—so much that they naturally shrink in its presence. Or perhaps it’s more that people believe immigrants should shrink. Gambito’s “Immigration” is such a refreshing, liberating read—“So what if I don’t love you.” Here is a voice that shakes its head and crosses its arms, while making me feel utterly welcome in its lyric space. 

Humor is thought of as an inviting device, but one should always consider who exactly is being invited. The humor in “Immigration” isn’t for everyone, but what kind of humor is, really? I resist the notion of universality, as it tends to mean something that appeals to the majority, to those already well-represented in literature. In workshops, my poems have been criticized for not being universal enough; white peers have suggested that the humor in my work won’t find an audience—without considering that they could make a greater effort to connect with my perspective, or that they may not be my intended readers. I wanted my work to challenge my peers, rather than invite them in. Or, more accurately, I wanted my poems to invite them to engage with something challenging. It was an invitation and a challenge many refused without further reflection (and, when I pushed back, with defensiveness). 

In place of the universal, which I find a deeply limiting standard or aspiration based in racism, I insist on the communal, that which is shared in a particular context between particular people. An example of this is the anecdote I opened with, the time my mother turned to me with a smile on her face and said, “Oh, he’s getting deported,” when my father left for his immigration lawyer meeting. Thankfully, he didn’t get deported. What I’m struck by is how, to an outsider, this would seem like an awful joke to make. 

A part of me thinks she said it because it was unlikely that my father would actually be deported and she was annoyed about something else. Another part of me believes she made the joke because she was nervous, not about him being deported (at what was a much later and more stable point in my family’s immigration), but about other issues related to our status. After all, there had been so many hoops and hurdles and hills (and any other words starting with “h” that signify struggle) in my family’s journey through the US immigration system. What if there was another hidden (word starting with “h”!) barrier? My mother might’ve made the joke to both lighten the mood and to cope with her anxiety. 

My mother’s joke haunts me because it’s a reminder of just how slippery my family’s status is in this country. Sure, we’re permanent residents now, but how permanent, truly? We’ve lived here longer than we’ve lived anywhere else, but who knows? We could be deported. One misstep from us. One sweeping policy change by the government. Though we don’t usually talk about it directly, there’s a fear in my family that any day, any moment, we could lose everything we’ve built here, because we’re not perceived as really from here. So, my mother makes a joke about deportation, a joke neither of us would make in any other context. This humor, emerging from an immigrant precariousness, is a type I hadn’t encountered in poetry—until I read Gambito’s poem, “Getting Used to It,” which begins with some less charged but delightful bits of hilarity: 

To realize, I wish to ridicule people interested in martial arts. 

That I’m not getting better. 

The voice is at once critical of others and self-deprecating, then the tone shifts as we settle into the core scene—a phone conversation between the speaker’s uncle and father. 

My uncle would prank call my father, “Immigration!” 

He’d crow. And my father would fall to silence. 

No matter the heavy accent. 

No matter the voice he’d known unto boredom. 

[…]

The quality of the joke and how it rested

on the bad stomach of a tensile citizenry. 

The joke was that, in an instant, 

We Lost Everything. 

“I don’t know whether to cry or to laugh” has become something of a cliché, but the first time I read this poem, that was precisely my reaction—to the situation described and to the fact that I’d never before read lines that felt this close to my mother’s “Oh, he’s getting deported.” Indeed, every reread of this poem grips me in an embrace of piercing recognition: “We Lost Everything.” I love the way each word is capitalized as if this were the title of a song, a song my family has long been singing in our own way. I want to cry. I want to laugh. Sometimes, I am. Crying, laughing, both. 

When genuine, these reactions come straight from the body. They are visceral and probably not the prettiest, but the most honest. The body can’t help but react—crack up or break down or, yes, both. The body knows the sadness behind the joke, which is funnier for how sad the situation is. Embedded in Gambito’s poem is a critique of the political reality that fills immigrants’ lives with so much uncertainty and worry. Maybe the uncle’s joke, like my mother’s, is a way of alleviating the stress, even if it terrifies the father, at least initially. The joke makes light of the family’s fears but also brings the reader deeper into them. The situation’s sadness is paradoxically illuminated by how much the teller or listener (or reader) laughs.

It is important to remember who would laugh first—

the perpetrator/uncle/jokester or the assailed/father/feather. 

Or, maybe, it isn’t. 

Maybe what you should know is that

they told this joke over and over and ever. 

A joke told “over and over and ever” is what’s behind the title of the poem, “Getting Used to It,” where “It” may refer to the joke itself, to the telling of it, to the reactions it provokes, to the circumstances behind it—or to any combination of these. Ultimately, the poem asks its reader: can you get used to it? The poem’s title isn’t “Gotten Used to It” or simply “Used to It.” The -ing in “Getting” implies an ongoing response to the drama, the tragicomedy that happens between the uncle and the father, which is also unfinished. It’s this expression of an unending dilemma—when can an immigrant family finally feel at home, at peace?—that resonates with me “over and ever.” 

Gambito’s work doesn’t only invite me, as an immigrant and Asian American poet. It also challenges me. Lately, I’ve been noticing how her poems include lots of different people being funny. I wonder how often my parents, especially my hilarious mother, get to do that in my own poems. While their sense of humor does shine through at times, mostly by how it influences mine, I’d like to center more of their jokes and hijinks. I want to celebrate their wisecracking, hold it as close as Gambito’s holds my ticklish heart.